grav’s Comments

Before my current job (working for Honeywell), I was in the HVAC industry. Honeywell is one of maybe only two or three major competitors in the high-end thermostat field; the reason there hasn't been much innovation in thermostats in a while is because there's really not that much more you can do to improve upon them, short of mounting an iPad to your wall, and who wants that?
Oh, wait. Someone else figured out how to do it, AND keep it moderately simple/small enough that consumers want it? We can't have this. Lets use that good old fashioned capitalist mentality to brute force them out of the picture. If we happen to be able to reverse engineer a few good ideas out of it, maybe we'll even name our next model after them in tribute. Yeah, we'll call it the Bird, or something. Remember, as John D. Rockefeller once said, "competition is a sin."

I usually just keep silent and observe the antics that are the TechDirt Comments from the comfort of my chair, but something about this post inspires me to speak up.
First of all, running the risk of sounding arrogant (of which I'm sure I will be accused anyway) am I the only one that can't seem to take seriously posts that are attempting to be intelligent, yet are riddled with poor spelling and grammar?
Second, Al Qaeda isn't even a real organization - it's a trivial name that the US Government created and applied as a label to give us yet another something to fear - and one that Osama Bin Laden only began referencing after we applied it and it was clear that's what we were dubbing him and his ilk.
Third, (and here's where I usually try to keep my mouth shut because I know if I haven't lost the reader yet, I'm about to) 'Al Qaeda', or more appropriately the un-related group of people we have dubbed Al Qaeda, wasn't even responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th (you know, the ones that sparked the creation of both the Dept of Homeland Security and the TSA). The only reason those attacks happened was because they were allowed to happen by the same people that brought you the TSA; planes crashing into buildings poses about as much threat to this country as does a polio outbreak.

I agree here. You've got two artists - Kevin Spacey and CWL, who are both pushing it a little too far, I think. It's tough to draw a line for this, but it's even tougher to leave things subjective. On the one hand, Kevin Spacey could just as easily have said "screw it, it's just a name let him use it" or "call the album whatever you want, just put something on the inside jacket that I had nothing to do with it" (personally I think having the phrase "Kevin Spacey is in no way affiliated with this album" would have been funny/cool if all this legal nonsense had never been brought up as a point). On the other hand you have an artist who very clearly designed album art implying that the album artist is Kevin Spacey - sort of a "push-the-envelope" move to begin with. (As for the picture looking like Kevin Spacey, sorry but that picture could be anyone - there's no definable marks or traits anywhere on it)